The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • ‘TSA Moves on From Your Underwear to Your Starbucks’

    Here’s the story: you get through security at the airport after being given cancer, or being groped, to get a nice hot cup of something resembling coffee from Starbucks, only to then be stopped by TSA as you drink it — because that now might be a bomb. I mean, you were cleared through security, but who knows what you have now done to your drink. TSA says this isn’t new, it’s been in place since 2007, which only makes me shake my head more.

    Assuming TSA does a top-notch job all the way around((It took forever to get the tears of laughter out of my eyes to finish writing that phrase.)) , where’s the potential for that cup of `joe` to be anything but a milky-coffee-ish drink? I mean TSA screened the purchaser **and** cleared them, screened the Starbucks employees **and** cleared them, and screen everything coming into the Starbucks that made that drink **and** yet again cleared those items.

    So, TSA, what changed that all of a sudden gives you reason to doubt your own competency?

  • ‘Nokia Caught Faking Video Footage From ‘PureView’ Lumia Camera’

    I’m actually linking to Gruber, not the [*The Verge* post](http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3294545/nokias-pureview-ads-are-fraudulent) for one specific reason, this quote:

    >Bullshit. It’s clear that this was meant to demonstrate footage shot using the Lumia itself.

    Keep this quote in mind every time you see a gadget commercial — Apple included — because if you don’t read the “fine print” then you are going to be woefully disappoint the first time you use Siri, or Android.

    Off the top of my head, here’s some things I can think of that are not “as they seem” (and yes, most are qualified with fine print):

    – Siri’s speed.
    – iPhone app switching speed.
    – 4G LTE Speed.
    – AT&T coverage.
    – Aperture not crashing or “beach balling” the system.
    – Users knowing what the back button does in Android every time.
    – People standing in line for non-Apple gadgets.
    – People in line for Apple gadgets wanting anything Samsung makes.
    – The Mariners hitting home runs, well that’s technically not related.

    You get my point. What Nokia did is clearly bullshit, but it’s the same bullshit every other company pulls.

    Though, to be fair to Gruber, this is particularly egregious brand of bullshit from Nokia.

  • ‘The Thanks Email’

    Gabe over at Macdrifter:
    >It’s called an acknowledgement. It’s not just about having good manners. It’s about establishing a shared perception of reality. I sent you freaking electrons through a five-thousand miles of wire and air and I’d like to assume they made it, but I can’t. The “thanks” email works for me.

    Personally, unsurprisingly, I hate the “thanks” emails. There is a time and place when you need confirmation that an email was received — I do that by adding a small bit of text at the end of the message: “please confirm receipt of this document/email/whatever”. Otherwise I expect — hope — that I get no response to most emails that don’t otherwise contain that bit of text, or a question.

    Likewise I only respond to emails that absolutely require it — the last thing I ever want to do is fill up an already full inbox with an email that says “thanks.” It’s nice, but it’s also pointless most of the time. So please, don’t send me these emails and I won’t send them to you.

  • Collapsible Blog

    David Bieber’s created some code that folds a paragraph of a blog post and instead of showing all those cumbersome words, you get a short and concise summary of that paragraph. This, he says, is done to make blogging more skimmable.

    It’s a neat trick, but do we really need Cliff’s Notes for blog posts? I think not. Besides one can already use the Summarize tool in Mac OS X to do this same thing for the entire post. You know what you get when you do this? An incomplete blog post, which are already — by nature — very short. If there’s a blog post you want to read, but you don’t have time to read it, [I suggest you save it for later reading](http://instapaper.com).

  • ‘When a Kickstarter Campaign Fails, Does Anyone Get the Money Back?’

    If you don’t know the answer to the above question, you shouldn’t be backing things on Kickstarter. As Aarti Shahani points out:
    >As entrepreneurs come online, Kickstarter and hundreds of similar platforms will have to sort out if each transaction is a donation or a purchase.

    It’s actually best to think of every Kickstarter “backing” as a donation and not a purchase, if that isn’t what you intended then you might be in for a surprise. As I, and many other backers have found out, the more ambitious the project, the more likely it is to be delayed indefinitely.

    The example used in the article is Ouya, which always sounded neat, but equally dubious in the ability of it to be made through a Kickstarter campaign. It’s one thing to make a great one-off product, and another to try and crowdsource funding a device that should rival the Wii.

    What I really hated in reading this article was the wishy-washy nature of the response from Kickstarter — they (unsurprisingly) want to stay out of the debate of whether funds should be refunded if a project fails. I think Kickstarter wants to stay out of the debate because typically the money will have been spent by the time a refund should have been given.

    I think a happy middle ground would be Kickstarter, in no uncertain terms, stating that you are donating to the cause — not pre-ordering a product. I also think it would massively help by removing many rewards that don’t matter — such as t-shirts and stickers — forcing the project creators to actually focus on the bigger items and not the smaller rewards.

    That’s just me though…

  • ‘Hide Archive Items From Apple Mail’s VIP Inbox’

    Thank you Mr. Sparks, thank you so very much for this tip.

  • The 1 Million Apple UDIDs Allegedly Leaked Thing

    Marco Arment:

    >For instance, this is exactly the information that an ad network would want to collect. And in order to get stats from 12 million devices, it would probably need to be from a set of popular, free apps… where you’d probably see ads.

    What was that I kept hearing from people that argued *for* free, ad supported, models? Something about “no real cost to them”, “not caring about what the advertisers do with their info”, wonder if those same people don’t care about this as well?

    That probably sounded like a thinly veiled “I told you so”. Let me restate: [I told you so](https://brooksreview.net/2011/03/fragility-free/).

    It likely won’t matter soon, as Arment points out, this is something that Apple is patching up — so that such data cannot be unknowingly siphoned off.

  • ‘Force Word and Other Apps to Use Retina Display for Text’

    This is interesting, I haven’t tried it yet because I need Word to work on my Mac for work stuff (I get too many Docx files that don’t open right in Pages), but I just may give it a go later today. Fascinating that this is just a plist code addition to enable retina text.

  • The Crux of Social Media

    Shawn “Wisdom” Blanc:
    >But now that you are thinking about it, why not give yourself permission to unfollow whomever you want without worrying about hurting their feelings.

    [Agreed](https://brooksreview.net/2011/05/follow/). I have a fantastic email about this sitting in my inbox from a reader and podcast listener. I haven’t gained permission to post it, but here is the subject line that speaks directly to this point: “The Facebook ideology that is destroying Twitter”.

    His argument is that Twitter is becoming annoying and crappy because Facebook users are coming over with little concept of the differentiation between “following” and “friending” which means the two are becoming identical in the mind of users. Ugh.

    What made Twitter great was that you didn’t have to know someone to follow along with their thoughts, and you need not know (or care to know) those that follow along with your thoughts. What is ruining Twitter is that now, it seems, you *should* care about these pointless things.

  • Samsung’s Innovation?

    Great reporting over at *The Next Web* about Samsung trying to force two bloggers into promoting their products, with the only other option being stuck in Germany (luckily it sounds like Nokia stepped in to be the hero).

    So is this what happens when Samsung is left to *innovate* on its own?

    I think a lot of people are shocked that I refuse 99.9% of promo codes, the last one I took was for Matt Gemmell’s [Sticky Notifications](http://instinctivecode.com/sticky-notifications/). That will also probably be the last promo code I take, not that Matt asked me to do anything — [here’s the email if you don’t believe me](https://f3a98a5aca88d28ed629-2f664c0697d743fb9a738111ab4002bd.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/gemmell-email.jpeg) (posted without Matt’s permission).

    The thing with accepting any kind of a free handout, is that you never know what strings may all of a sudden appear later on. That’s why I accepted one from Matt: I trust him. I knew there would be no strings and that’s the opposite with other developers: I usually can’t say I trust them because I simply don’t know them well enough.

    Here’s a pretty typical email that I see about every other day:

    > Mr. Brooks Review,
    > We have launched our new X app and we know that you would find much value from it. Here is a promo code for you to download it from the Apple App Store: PROMO CODE.
    > After you download it please send me link to your review, we love your site.
    > We love you, you are the best.

    I *may* have made up the last line.

    Every email is so impersonal that they don’t even bother to look up my name, which has *always* been at the top of the site near the name of the site. They always have no reasons why I would like the app and always offer a promo code in exchange for a link or review on my site. I always mark the emails as spam.

    This does not, however, mean that I don’t want to see any email about your app. Send me a link, tell me why you like it — just don’t expect that I want a promo code or to post about it. Also remember that I am just as likely to hate the app as I am to like it.

    The best emails that I get about new apps have a link to a post that I wrote. Usually the app either solves a problem that I posted about, adds to a round up of apps that I did, or is a developer wanting to throw his hat in the ring and get my feedback.

    Back to Samsung. It’s pretty shitty Samsung strung these bloggers along until it was too late for them — it’d be exciting and flattering to want to be flown and put up for a major tech event, so I can see why they tried to make the deal work — the real blame lies with Samsung and I am glad the bloggers had the balls to get this story out there.

  • A Good Talk Show

    Alex Arena ((The blogger with the best name.)) invited me to be on the second episode of his new interview podcast *A Good Talk Show*. I had a fun time and he got me ranting about TSA at the end.

  • Samsung’s Identity

    Choe Sang-Hun in a long piece for The New York Times about Samsung, perfectly encapsulates what Samsung is, was, and will continue to be:
    >Although the name Samsung is synonymous with sophistication among South Koreans, the company has never created a product so innovative that it has defined an era in consumer culture, like the Sony Walkman or the Apple iPhone.

    Samsung has done an amazing job, as the article points out, at reacting quickly and moving fast when another companies idea catches a spark.

    >“Look what has happened to companies like Nokia, Motorola and BlackBerry, which didn’t do as Samsung did,” Mr. Song added, referring to competitors whose failures to adapt quickly to the smartphone boom driven by iPhones have drastically reduced their market shares. “Samsung may lack in innovation, but right now, no one can beat Samsung in playing catch-up.”

    What Samsung does in consumer electronics it does very well, but what happens to Samsung when they don’t have someone to follow? I’d argue the same thing happens that happened to Microsoft when Apple was faltering and wasn’t innovating OS features — you get Windows XP for a decade. ((Yes, OS X came out alongside XP, but OS X so caught Microsoft off guard that they had to re-tool in order to move to compete.))

  • ‘Rhino Is the First Native iOS Client for App.net to Charge Into the App Store’

    Christine Chan reviews the first App.net client to hit Apple’s App Store:
    >Rhino still has a long way to go before it can replace the beta software that I’ve been using on my iPhone, but I guess it’s a start for ADN users who haven’t gotten into a beta.

    I’d agree with her assessment of the app, it’s a nice app, but it has a long ways to go. There are tons of beta ADN apps floating around and many have many more features than Rhino currently offers. What’s most intriguing to me is that the app is free — why be first if you have no way to make money?

    Regardless, if you use App.net (and you should) and don’t have any beta iOS apps to use — Rhino is leagues better than using web apps.

  • ‘Bluetooth Update’

    [At the beginning of August Fred Wilson posted about the absurd notion that AirPlay is bad in comparison to Bluetooth](https://brooksreview.net/2012/08/bluetooth-v-airplay/). Now he has an update about his Bluetooth stereo setup, in which he says:

    >Bottom line. It’s fucking fantastic.

    He’s elated that he can replicate his car stereo in his home. ((Also he notes “I got some super high end RCA cables”, which actually explains a lot about his illusions of grandeur.)) And then Wilson gets to the negatives:

    >First, it can only pair with one device.

    Yeah, my wife is also dumbfounded why our car can only pair with one cellphone at a time to use the handsfree setup — I bet she’d love it if I brought that “experience” into our home.

    >Also, bluetooth has limited range so the phone has to be in the same room as the Logitech Adapter to play music.

    I mean, if I want to listen to music with a setup that can stream the audio to any room in my house, there’s no way I would want to carry my phone with me to change the song. I mean mix tapes are great, never need to skip a song on them.

    But still, “fucking fantastic”.

    I needed to charge my laptop the other day and out of sheer laziness I didn’t want to move it from my home office to the living room, but still I wanted to AirPlay over a video I was streaming from a website — I mean it still worked just fine in my office — I’m just telling you that I was lazy and didn’t want my computer tethered to one room to make ancient technology work.

    That’s all I’m saying.

  • Reaching a Bit

    PJ on Groklaw:
    >Apple’s lawyers are still clueless that the public is for the most part repulsed by Apple’s IP aggression.

    Really? Where’s the data to back this load of shit up?

    Does the public even know the extent of Apple/Samsung/Motorola/Microsoft/Nokia/HTC’s legal battles?

    I doubt it. Even if they did, I doubt the public would be “repulsed”.

  • The Economist’s Patent Reformer Article

    In an unattributed article posted to the Economist website today, the article goes into patent reform and why the writer thinks it would be “good”, wrapping up with this in the second to last paragraph:
    >The existing criteria for a patent should be applied with greater vigour. Specialised courts for patent disputes should be established, with technically minded judges in charge: the inflated patent-damage awards of recent years are largely the result of jury trials. And if patents are infringed, judges should favour monetary penalties over injunctions that ban the sale of offending products and thereby reduce consumer choice.

    To which I say: close, but not quite.

    There is no doubt that the U.S. and International Patent laws need to be reformed — specifically to deal with software patents. However the Apple v. Samsung spat is much simpler than patents, it is about plagiarism. Apple contends that Samsung blatantly and willfully copied them — the jury agreed.

    To rectify such an outcome you cannot simply award monetary damages unless they are ongoing (for as long as the copying continues) — the injunction is meant to pull the copied product off the market.

    This does reduce choice, there is no doubt about that, but it also stays true to the original goal of the patent system: to encourage innovation, by allowing protection of that innovation for an exclusive period of time — protection from copying.

    It’s actually quite simple, if you are a blogger complaining about the Apple v. Samsung verdict, then I am sure you are fine with me copying your site design to a `t` and simply re-writing everything you post. Right? Oh, you aren’t OK with that? Huh, funny.

  • ‘How Two Amateur Sleuths Looked for FinSpy Software’

    Nicol Perlroth reporting on a software tool used by governments called ‘FinSpy’:
    >On Wednesday, the researchers announced one of their biggest discoveries yet. They discovered new mobile versions of the spyware that had been customized for Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Windows Mobile, Nokia’s Symbian and BlackBerry’s mobile operating systems.

    Basically the software is installed (I have no clue how) and can track the communications of the devices that it is on, and in the case of PC/Macs, much more data. It’s actually pretty scary to think that such software exists, but is also of no surprise that it does exist.

    Reading through this article, some of the stuff in it seems straight out of movies.

  • ‘Who Inherits Your iTunes Library?’

    An interesting story from Quentin Fottrell at MarketWatch, where he discovers that you really can’t pass along all your digital books, movies, and music when you die. This seems pretty logical with iTunes, since the “ownership” is tied to *your* email address, but it also poses a lot of problems.

    For instance, in my home (as I am sure is common in many homes), only one person has a huge music collection (me) and therefore should I pass before the others in my family — what are they to do? Buy all the music again? Keep using my login forever?

    That ties into something else I have long been thinking about: what happens to blogs, like this one, when the proprietor dies? I wish there were someway to cheaply preserve the content and links to the content long-term. There’s no easy solution to the problem, but it is a going to be a massive problem — all of a sudden links are going to break because sites (and all the content for the sites) just vanish.

  • Sony VAIO Tap 20

    [Shawn and I talked about this on *The B&B Podcast* episode 74](http://5by5.tv/bb/74). Basically this is a 20-inch multi-touch display that houses a “full” computer in the same way that an iMac would. The difference is that this is made to be moved off of a desk and used as a tablet, or whatever. You have to love the way the Sony confusingly describes the product:

    >Portable, battery-powered VAIO™ Tap 20 fits right into any living space – from bedrooms and kids’ play areas to the kitchen or garden. Lay it on a coffee table and let everyone join in games on the large multi-touch screen. Flip out the in-built stand and tilt VAIOTM Tap 20 at a comfortable angle for ‘lean back’ photo/movie editing by touch operation, browsing and entertainment. Or stand it upright and use as a fully-functioning desktop PC: it’s easy to work on documents, surf or check emails with the supplied wireless keyboard and mouse.

    Sounds to me like they are billing it as a replacement, or better option, than:

    – A tablet.
    – A laptop.
    – A desktop.

    Essentially it is all three in one. It has a battery with unknown battery life, it has a stand, a multi-touch display, weighs north of 10 pounds, has an ethernet port, and *so* much more.

    All I can think is: my god this is a bad idea.

    I am usually pretty good at figuring out scenarios where a device or gadget would fill a need, and perhaps even fill the need better than other devices for a certain niche of people, but with the VAIO Tap 20 I was at a loss. It’s not going to be a better desktop computer than a true desktop, it’s going to make for an even worse laptop, and an still even worse tablet.

    I’ve been wracking my brain on this one since talking to Shawn about it and I think I have it: it’s the ultimate board game.

    No really, think about it. The biggest pain in the ass factor with board games is setting them up, with the VAIO Tap 20, you just launch the game you want to play, it deals out the (whatever for the game) and then you play — hell you could even save the game and resume later (handy for playing me in Monopoly).

    So there you have it: Sony has made the ultimate board game computer system.

  • ‘Rexpedit’

    A clever hack to an Ikea shelving unit which turns it into a decent looking desk. I have two of these shelving units, but know that they make larger ones, so I am betting you could make a pretty sweet standing desk using this technique — if you have, let me know.

    Personally I was in Ikea over the weekend and [saw these wall mounted desk/tables](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/80217524/). I really liked them and am thinking about building a similar desk.

    My idea would be to have a permanent lower desk that was sitting height, it would have a 24″ or so leaf that drops back towards the wall. Then above it I would have a wall mounted desk that opens up at standing height. The lower desk would be out of the way for my legs, but still be able to hold hard drives and such on the back.

    I would like to design it so that the top of the standing desk would make a nice clean backdrop for the sitting desk. Anyways, just my thoughts for now as I am thinking through several desk designs that I want to build.